Derek > Derek's Quotes

“The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“So Harris quit, started a nonprofit called Time Well Spent with the mission”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Soon after going public, he was featured on the cover of the Atlantic, interviewed on 60 Minutes and PBS NewsHour, and was whisked off to give a TED talk.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“the inner game. This is the game that takes place in the mind of the player, and it is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt and self-condemnation. In short, it is played to overcome all habits of mind which inhibit excellence in performance.”
― W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

“The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills; he discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard. He aims at the kind of spontaneous performance which occurs only when the mind is calm and seems at one with the body, which finds its own surprising ways to surpass its own limits again and again. Moreover, while overcoming the common hang-ups of competition, the player of the inner game uncovers a will to win which unlocks all his energy and which is never discouraged by losing.”
― W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

“thoughts. The concentrated mind has no room for thinking how well the body is doing, much less of the how-to’s of the doing. When a player is in this state, there is little to interfere with the full expression of his potential to perform, learn and enjoy.”
― W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

“Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Young people born between 1995 and 2012, a group Twenge calls “iGen,” exhibited remarkable differences as compared to the Millennials that preceded them. One of the biggest and most troubling changes was iGen’s psychological health. “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed,” Twenge writes, with much of this seemingly due to a massive increase in anxiety disorders. “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Returning to our canary-in-the-coal-mine analogy, the plight of iGen provides a strong warning about the danger of solitude deprivation. When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. We shouldn’t be surprised that these absences lead to malfunctions.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive—it helps us get the job done with a minimum of fuss—eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us. The muscles of attention atrophy. Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.) If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch. This is why the various travel metaphors for the psychedelic experience are so apt.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious. Yet people come out of the experience understanding these platitudes in a new way; what was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of a deeply rooted conviction. And, more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Altered States of Consciousness, that made a tremendous impression on Paul. Edited by Charles T. Tart,”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Though reading is no substitute for hearing McKenna expound his thesis (you can find him on YouTube), he summarizes it in Food of the Gods (1992): Psilocybes”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them. Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face. I don’t know. But if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James again, “forbid[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Open-minded. And bemushroomed. That was me, now, ready to reopen my own accounts with reality.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“As Huxley wrote to Osmond in its aftermath, “What came through the closed door was the realization . . . the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.” The force of this insight seemed almost to embarrass the writer in its baldness: “The words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“What was it like before?” Sophia asked Enoch a few minutes later, after they had all got drinks at the drive-thru. The autopilot was back in effect and they were heading toward the relatively bright lights of Moab, still a couple of miles distant. She was thinking about the woman reading the book in the information center. About the whole idea of information centers. About information. “Depends on how far back you want to go,” Enoch pointed out. “Just saying that for everyone else in this car the post-Moab world is basically all we’ve ever known. Where people can’t even agree that this town exists.” “What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?” Enoch asked. He seemed a little amused by the question. Not in a condescending way. More charmed. “Yeah. Because they did, right? Walter Cronkite and all that?” Enoch pondered it for a bit. “I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Security was, though, an ongoing rock-paper-scissors match between technologies that all seemed to want different things. The lobby of the building, its elevators and stairwells, and its exterior belts of walkways and gardens had all been covered by security cameras from the very beginning of Zula and Csongor’s tenancy. In those days a security guard would sit all day behind a reception desk in the lobby, keeping an eye on the main entrance, glancing down from time to time at an array of flat-panel monitors that showed him the feeds from those cameras. But the desk had been torn out some years ago and replaced with a big saltwater aquarium. The building still employed a security firm. But those guards who were human, and who were actually on site, spent most of the day up on their feet, strolling about the property while keeping track of events in wearable devices. Some of the “guards” were just algorithms, analyzing video and audio feeds for suspicious behavior, recognizing faces and cross-checking them against a whitelist of residents, friends, and neighbors, and a blacklist of predators, stalkers, and ex-husbands. Anything ambiguous was forwarded to a Southeast Asian eyeball farm.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“There was an odd bending around in back at the extreme limits of culture and politics where back-to-the-land hippies and radical survivalists ended up being the same people, since they spent 99 percent of their lives doing the same stuff.”
― Neal Stephenson, Termination Shock